Instead of unicorns and snowmen, readers can color images of Donald Trump and illustrations that represent freedom of speech, Russian collusion theories, the Ku Klux Klan and football civil rights action.

That sure does sound exciting. Usually the motivation for coloring books aimed at “adults” is that they’re supposed to calm people down somehow. I can’t imagine the intended audience for this coloring book calming themselves by coloring an image of Donald Trump. It seems like an opportunity to stew in one’s own angry coloring juices for a few minutes.

One of the authors, by the way, is a law librarian, and a white guy, to put the book into some context.

The article itself doesn’t live up to the headline, because nowhere in the article is there any evidence that the book has “hit a nerve.”

The closest we get is that the main author “knows the book won‘t necessarily sit well with conservatives but hopes to open minds.”

Hoping to open minds with a book like this is rather naive, but even librarians can be politically naive sometimes, or maybe that’s most of the time.

However, some conservatives indeed don’t like the book, if the far right commenters at Breitbart and Stormfront count as “conservatives.” I wouldn’t consider them conservatives, but my model is someone like George Will, not drooling racists. But maybe that’s just me.

Google this to find them, because I don’t want to link to such nastiness: ‘I Am So Sick of White Guys’ coloring ebook. Both Breitbart and Stormfront show up high in the search results, or at least they did for me.

I don’t spend much time venturing into political echo chambers, either left or right. They always insult my intelligence, make me feel like I need a shower, or both.

But it’s instructive to learn that being ruled by a “majority of white men” is what makes this country so great. Fortunately, the chances of ever being ruled by the majority of white men who comment at Stormfront are almost nil.

It’s also fascinating to watch a discussion of Japanese culture, motivated by the possibility that one of the authors might have a Japanese wife, based on “where he is domiciled,” which is an awkward way of saying he lives in Japan. Why would anyone care?

There’s the usual round of insults. The authors are “beta cucks” and some other stuff I don’t even want to know what it means. And, of course, they’re “snowflakes.”

That has got to be the most ironic insult in the far right’s limited vocabulary of insults, because what could be a better example of being a snowflake than to become angry or upset over a coloring book?

How fragile does your ego have to be that a silly coloring book even registers as something worth directing your attention to, much less angrily commenting about on the internet?

That sort of behavior isn’t confined to the far right, of course, or the people who “domicile” themselves in the cesspool of Stormfront wouldn’t use the term.

But it’s especially amusing given the white macho man attitude these men project. These guys know they’re superior to women and people of color, and they don’t mind saying so.

I’ve met some “real men,” men who live up to the stereotypes. They can build a barn as easily as drink a beer, fix your plumbing while watching a football game, and lightheartedly grill a mean steak as the world collapses around them.

Do you know what they all had in common? They couldn’t care less about coloring books.

The response to this silly book is a microcosm of the internet these days. Some lefties praise it without seeing it, the far right gets their knickers in a twist that everyone doesn’t worship all white men, just powerful and successful white men.

And the rest of us can sit back and laugh at the whole thing, perhaps lightheartedly eating a good steak as the world collapses around us.

Comments

“Hoping to open minds with a book like this is rather naïve, but even librarians can be politically naïve sometimes, or maybe that’s most of the time.” Because insulting people who disagree with you is a sure fire way to change their mind. I’m not a cis gendered, white, male, but I’m married to one. He wouldn’t really enjoy an anti-ANTIFA coloring book either because he doesn’t understand why we cannot have rational conversations. The question is, would he be welcome in that librarian’s library? Knowing that the librarian created this coloring book wouldn’t he be justified in feeling like his information needs would come second or he would be treated with disdain.

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